


a borrowed title

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 22:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11366685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: Thrynn had always picked up the roles Deborah discarded: when Deborah absconded from her duties to join the Seraph, Thrynn learned how to navigate the court.  When Deborah died, Thrynn did her best to be the hero her sister would have been.Gathering the remains of the Seraphs who fell in the assault on the Tower forces a Human Noble PC to navigate the treacherous meadows beneath the ruin and her own survivor's guilt.





	a borrowed title

**Author's Note:**

> This is entirely self-indulgent. I got invested in the personal story of my PC and I wanted more.

Something metallic gleamed in the muck beneath Thrynn’s feet.  At a glance, its shape was familiar; it made Thrynn’s heart beat painfully behind her ribs.  For a moment, she thought she had wandered into another pocket of toxins.  The miasma that hung over the Greyhoof meadows twisted the mind as it poisoned the body, making shadows and specters rise from the muck and shards of wreckage.  Monstrous worms rose from sticks in the mud; a fragment of movement became a spectral bird, bursting out towards Thrynn’s face; the shadows of the fallen tower stretched out into figures, their hands clawing at her, their eyes wide in accusation.

She had done her best to avoid the miasmas, carefully navigating around the areas where the air turned dark and poisonous, but it wasn’t always obvious.  There was no use sitting around and twiddling her thumbs over whether a particular patch of air would be safe to walk through or not.  Not when it was her task to stop the spread of the toxin, to clear it away here before it could expand to the cities and communities beyond.

So by the time a gleam in the mud caught her eye, her head was already pounding from her trips back and forth through the meadows; her eyes felt rough and heavy in their sockets, and her limbs not quite connected to her body.  She had to try once, twice, to get her hands on the emblem half-buried beneath her, but at last she managed to grab it and pull it free.

It came out of the mud with a squelch.

The shape was as familiar to her hand as it was to her eyes; a Seraph’s badge.

She stared at it.  Fear seized her, making her freeze in place, constricting her chest until she couldn’t breathe.  This fear had once been an old friend; it haunted her from the corners of her noble house to the streets of Shaemoor, when she thought it had been burned away for good.  The coldness of all the anxieties she had every time Deborah went out to fight coming true, all at once; knowing that somewhere out on the paths her sister had died under a centaur’s hooves.  No blaze of glory for the hero she had been; no songs, barely even any note.  Just a bit of paperwork, Falcon Company scratched out of existence with a callousness akin to the sweep of an accountant’s pen, striking out an error.

There had been no body, nothing to bury, no goodbyes to say.  Lady Deborah was the head of House Meridia, irrelevant and small as it was; there was no house matriarchs or patriarchs to mourn her passing, or to tell Thrynn how much responsibility lay on her shoulders, now that she was the heir and sole carrier of her name.  The truth was, she had been acting as such for years.  Deborah was the hero, and Thrynn followed in her shadow, doing the jobs she left vacant.  Deborah shunned social occasions, preferring to spar with their father’s mercenaries or visit the temples instead of wasting time with small talk; Thrynn forced herself out of her tinkerer’s workshop and the seclusion she was accustomed to and fumbled her way through parties until she knew the language of the court like she knew the workings of her first pistol.  Deborah joined the Seraph, pledging neutrality and service and turning away from her dwindling bloodline to become a hero; Thrynn took over the duties of the heir in full, and kept their bloodline in good standing with the Queen.

Deborah became more of a concept than anything else; her beloved sister, writer of scarce, scattered letters that came to the house stained with mud and sometimes blood.  Deborah who was home once a season, bearing stories of horror and heroism.  Deborah, who became less and less the sister Thrynn had chased through the halls of their home and more and more a stranger, a soldier, the hero she was meant to be.

Deborah died, far away from home.  Deborah would not return.  Thrynn became a… hero.

The title sat badly on her shoulders.

As much as she tried to tell herself that Deborah was dead, a part of her was still convinced she held that title only temporarily.  Only until Deborah returned.  Deborah wouldn’t have been so scared at Shaemoor.  Deborah wouldn’t have fumbled her way through the fight, almost dying in the end.  Deborah would have cut through the politicians’ machinations with the broadsword of her honesty, not wheedled out lies with a noble’s tongue.  Deborah would have loved to uphold the law with her sword and her magic instead of reluctantly putting aside words when trial by combat was called.

So Deborah couldn’t be dead.  She would step into this role that had been thrust onto Thrynn.

That was one of the subtle lies that had allowed Thrynn to fake her way through all of this.  But it all hinged on the fact she had never seen her sister’s body.  It all hinged on not even receiving her badge.  It all hinged on that.

Thrynn stared at the Seraph’s badge.  If she turned it over, she would see a name, and a unit.  She just needed to turn it over.

Below her, in the mud, partiall covered in wreckage, she could make out pale bone and rusting armor.

The logical, rational part of her mind was already sputtering away at the details of why this object was here.  It was normal.  The Seraph had assaulted the Tower when it stood; their units had suffered heavy casualties.  She could hear the weary note in Sergeant Raine’s voice as she pointed one toxin-scarred gauntlet at the purifiers.

“The bodies of our fallen are strewn beneath the wreckage.”

This wasn’t Deborah.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t.  She was Falcon Company, and she had died fighting the centaurs.  She had never seen the tower rise.

But still, Thrynn couldn’t turn the badge over.

Shapes were swirling around her, and a figure stepped through the mist.  A Seraph’s single wing hung over Deborah’s shoulder, as she stared at Thrynn.  Her eyes were empty, but her smile was cruel and mocking.  And then it was gone.

Thrynn stumbled back, gasping.  Gasping.  She couldn’t breathe.  Her chest hurt, her lungs felt crushed, her head was spinning.  Too late, she realized how distracted she was; she’d let the miasma of toxic gas creep in, and now it was swirling all around her, stealing the air from her lungs.  Her pulse rushed in her ears, and her body shook, barely obeyed the most broad of her commands.

She fumbled for the elixir at her belt and found it.  Her second invention.  She should have been carrying her first, the elixir that healed, but strength and swiftness would have to do.  She held her breath and tipped it into her mouth, swallowing it.

In a few heartbeats, strength surged through her.  It gave her just enough to regain control of her limbs, to look up and see the way out of the cloud.  She stumbled to the edge of the meadow, and fell to her knees, gasping in the clean air.

Her right palm was slick, and dripping red.  When she lifted her hand and forced herself to unclench her fist, she realized she had gripped the Seraph’s badge so tightly in her panic that it had tug into her palm and drawn blood.

She turned the badge over.

The back was smudged with her blood.

When she wiped it away, it was not her sister’s name.

For a heartbeat, her shoulder fell, and she could breath more easily despite the pain in her lungs.  But a heartbeat later, she realized that this was another Seraph whose family did not know their fate.  Dead, without a body to bury, without a marker of their passing.

How many more lay in the meadows?

Thrynn wiped the badge carefully on her shirt, cleaning each crevice before putting it in her bag.  She would find them all.  These Seraphs were not Deborah.  This was not where her sister died.

But it was where someone’s missing Seraph had fell, and Thrynn could bring them home.


End file.
